InsaneJournal

Current mood:	Saw spasm
Current music:	Ghost in the Mirror ~ Memphis May Fire

Saw VI
I went to see Saw VI today! Quite possibly the greatest movie of the Saw series in my humble opinion, and I don't care if people think I'm crazy for it :D

This is probably not very coherent - I'm just trying to mention everything I can remember from it and it jumps around a lot, so bear with me.

Not everything about it was awesome. As with any movie there are going to be things that aren't great or things that could have been better. With this one, it was the traps. It's becoming painfully obvious that they're running out of ideas. There are only so many ways that you can maim, murder, and decapitate people before it gets old.

They weren't all bad, though. As was the case with Saw V, I think they opened with possibly the best trap, the Pound of Flesh. What an amazing (albeit flawed, which I'll get to later) way to open the movie. It drew me right in, but nothing after that seemed to live up to the opening. The Carousel Trap, for example. Is that all they could come up with - shooting people? And hanging people. Rather disappointing. I was glad to see them using some form of heat/fire again, although I think it could have been done better. I loved the Hydrofluoric Acid Trap at the end, though, melting William from the inside out. Very cool :D

Which brings me to the flaw in the Pound of Flesh Trap - there was no way for the trap itself to differentiate between flesh or anything else. Did it not occur to these people to rip off their clothes and shoes and throw those on the scales instead? I noticed that the knives and cleavers were chained in place, so they couldn't have used those, but they could have chopped up the wooden tables and threw those on as well. I'm sure that would have amounted to at lease a pound.

But I digress. Anyone who knows me knows I don't like these movies for the traps or the gore. I like them for the complex storylines they tell. As is always the case with the Saw movies, they answered just enough questions to satisfy me, but at the same time, opened up new possibilities and left me dying for more. Which is why I'll always be the first one in line when a new one comes out.

The highlight of the movie for me was Hoffman. How I love him. I hated him after Saw IV (because trying to replace John is just nonsense), but I started to like him a bit in Saw V. You can't really watch him through these movies - seeing how he got involved with John and first "testing" people - and not feel something for the man. But in this movie, I found myself outright cheering for him, just like I did for John once we got into his head a bit.

Once it seemed that the other detectives were on to him, I was on the edge of my seat, desperately wanting him to find a way out, and that he did. I thought he was doomed once they unscrambled the Seth Baxter tape, but Hoffman found a way out. I don't even care that he killed them all, as long as he's okay, and we can follow him through some more of these movies. And oh god, when Jill put him in the Reverse Bear Trap at the end, I thought he was done for again! You can't question the guy's will to live now, damn it, and hopefully he is okay. I think he was able to wedge the trap in the door before it pulled his jaw off, and he just sustained a bit of torn flesh around his mouth. Maybe he'll come back in Saw VII with some wicked scars :D

Although, to be fair, that wasn't a real Jigsaw trap. He really had no way of getting out, other than...what he did. He wasn't given any instructions on what to do, and Jill just basically left him for dead. John would be disappointed.

I have to give it to Costas Mandylor (and it just may be the fangirl in me, but I'm absolutely in love with his name) for bringing me around from absolutely despising Hoffman, to cheering for him and desperately wanting him to live. It takes a very gifted and emotional actor to bring about that kind of change. Writing, too, but without a good actor to back it up, he would just be a one-dimensional bad guy, which isn't the case at all.

Tobin Bell was amazing as always. It absolutely killed me seeing the family video he made of himself, Jill, and little Gideon. Just...god. It really makes you feel for him and what he lost. That being said, I don't think I could get enough of John and Hoffman interracting. You know me and boy bonding, and that's about as close as this series gets to it :D (I even had to make a snazzy new icon of them together to celebrate it!)

Tanedra Howard, my Scream Queen (I know some people don't like her, but to me, she owned that show). What to say about her except that she was amazing and I wished we could have seen more from her! I kind of figured she wasn't going to be in the movie that much. This is a Saw movie, and none of the characters last very long, especially not the supporting ones! I'm glad she didn't die and that we got to see her in the hospital after surviving her trap, but I wish she could have played more into the overall movie. But I loved what I saw of her, and she only reinforced my opinion that she deserved to be there (in the movie, not the trap :P). I hope we see more of her, if not from more Saw movies (I'm not holding out much hope for that after the amount of screentime she got), but as a actress in general, because she certainly is promising.

Very interesting name for the health insurance company - Umbrella Health. That wouldn't be a tribute to Resident Evil in any way, would it? Perhaps a bit of foreshadowing, too, because as any horror buff knows, any company named Umbrella is not a good thing! And damn straight to all of John's issues with the health companies being run by the government!

Loved that Agent Perez was alive. Didn't see that one coming at all! I also liked seeing the remains of Strahm afterwards, and how Hoffman used his decapitated hand to frame him even further. Even though the other detectives were able to determine pretty quickly that Strahm's fingerprints came from a dead body. That doesn't bode well for Hoffman in the future; it's only a matter of time before someone else figures it out as well.

I don't know how I feel about Jill doing all these things for John now. But I felt the same way with anyone who was an "accomplice" at first - neither Amanda nor Hoffman. I didn't like either one of them as a potential Jigsaw until I saw them in the role for a while. I always loved Jill, but I saw her as more of a victim in all of this. I suspected that John had left her something that would prompt her to test people, but I never thought she would actually do it. She always seemed to look down on what John was doing, but now that she's a part of it...it's really messing with my vision of her. But I'm sure we'll find out more about her part in all of this later on; I'm sure she has her reasons rather than "fulfilling John's last wishes", so I'll see how it plays out then.

We finally found out what was in the envelope that Hoffman left for Amanda in Saw III! Very interesting that he was blackmailing her into failing her test. I don't know how I feel about her now. Once I got used to her, I thought she was going to be a brilliant Jigsaw, but that obviously didn't work out. I was upset that she disappointed John so much by failing her last test, but now we come to find out that Hoffman was blackmailing her. Then again, Amanda was never a fair Jigsaw to begin with, because none of her tests were winnable; that defeats the entire purpose.

Loved the fact that they put Amanda at the clinic with Cecil on the night Jill miscarried Gideon. I'm wondering if John already knew that, though. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he tested her to begin with. Either way, I think Amanda grossly underestimated John's reaction to it. Even if it did come out from Hoffman later, I could see John forgiving her. That was her old life and he helped her to move forward from that. She wasn't like that anymore, and I think John would have recognized that.

People need to get over the whole Doctor Gordon thing. It's all over the message boards about how disappointed they are that we haven't seen him again yet. I'm really not sure why anyone keeps thinking that we will see him again - he hasn't been in any of the movies since the first one (body parts and name-dropping do not count). Accept that he's dead, that we may never get to see his final moments, and move on. They're called Saw, not The Doctor Gordon Story :P

As I said at the beginning of this very long review, I think this was possibly the best of the Saw films (as crazy as that makes me look). Even though some of the traps weren't very impressive, I love getting deeper and deeper into this storyline, and finding out more about the characters - especially Hoffman. I can't give it any less then four out of four stars **** And I think I speak for the rest of my theatre as well, because they all clapped at the end :D

Will probably add more to this, because I'm sure I'll think of something else I want to say!

Why, oh why, are people going to see this if they haven't seen the first five movies?? There are people on the Saw message boards, asking people to explain the first five movies to them, because they've only seen the most recent one. It just boggles the mind!

Oh, and I got carded! A week before my thirtieth birthday, it feels very nice indeed to be carded for an R rated movie! :D